Science, History and the Hindutva Brigade

Yesterday a reader and fan of B&W’s emailed me to express her admiration of Meera Nanda’s new article, and her work in general. She also alerted me to another example of scholarship under attack by the Hindutva brigade. I’m extremely glad she did: I was entirely unaware of the campaign against the historian Romila Thapar. Read about it here and here. This whole subject is immensely depressing and dispiritng – it always is dispiriting to see humans determinedly marching backwards, and patting themselves on the back for doing it.

While 72-year-old Thapar’s appointment was greeted with applause by serious students of history, little did anyone realise that acolytes of the Hindutva brand of politics, primarily those in the Indian diaspora, would unleash a vitriolic campaign against her built on name-calling and the disparaging of her professional qualifications…Thapar’s academic work is controversial with the Hindutva lobby because it is grounded in professional methods of historical investigation, rather than in the pet historical theories of Hindu extremists relying on extrapolation from Sanskrit texts…Thapar’s documentation of early Indian life is at odds with the Hindutva preference, grounded in a regressive Hindu orthodoxy, of seeing India as a purely Hindu civilisation, the political implications of which for contemporary India being obvious.

Nanda also talks about extrapolation from Sanskrit texts, in her case in science, so the connections are obvious, as are the implications for scholarship, independent thought of all kinds, knowledge, truth, public education, democracy. Never mind research or evidence, just consult The Book, be it the Bible or the Koran or Sanskrit texts. Books are excellent things, but infallible books, no.

With the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) assumption of power at the centre in 1998 and its ongoing attempts to remake the educational curriculum in its own chauvinistic image gaining momentum, intellectuals and academic positions at odds with the Sangh Parivar’s view of history have come under attack under various pretexts. The BJP has pursued a concerted effort to malign and delegitimise scholars and intellectuals at odds with its view of India’s past.

Well, if B&W can do anything at all to throw a monkey-wrench into that effort, that alone will justify our existence.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the new intolerance is the official sanction it receives through ministers and leaders of academic institutions which have been unscrupulously and ruthlessly saffronised, including universities, councils of historical and social science research, and the National Council for Educational Training and Research. Soon after the BJP took over the Indian Council of Historical Research, it banned volumes in the Towards Freedom project edited by distinguished historians Sumit Sarkar and K N Panikkar. NCERT has revised social science textbooks in a blatantly communal manner.

It’s all really very alarming (all the more so of course given the weapons the BJP has at its disposal). Rewriting history, down the memory hole, banning volumes of a history project – it all makes playful attitudes toward truth and universalism seem about as fun and useful as playing with gelignite.

3 Responses to “Science, History and the Hindutva Brigade”

But seriously, it’s something worse than ironic that some people should toss out one batch of supposed oppressors only to crawl in bed with another bunch just as bad, from the sound of it. All right, I don’t know much about India but what I do know doesn’t all sound that good. Castes, dowry killings, cow whiz–please. So I will shut up about that and agree that fundamentalist hokey is going on all over the place. In the sense of rewriting history and so on. Some Asatruar (Norse Neo-Pagans), e.g., are touting “Aryan” this and that which carries a whiff of Nazism,and involves historical claims that can’t possibly be true. To give exact sources I’d have to go do some digging, but key search terms would be “Odinism” or “Volkisch”. Or “Traditionalism”. Whether this counts as fundamentalism I am not sure, but it might–similar distance from logic. (Anyway, a while back I ran into a Theosophical analysis of Norse myth that claimed that since one group had a myth that the world began from frozen water, that means the ancients were scientists because they knew about hydrogen. I said to myself, “This is another reason not to buy new books, just used…I am NOT gonna support authors who put out crap like that.”)

Sure, that counts as fundamentalism. It’s the same kind of pseudo-history and pseudo-archaeology that surrounds the repatriation of remains issue, for example. We have our history, and they have theirs, and there’s no choosing between them. Between pomos and fundamentalists is a terrible place to be, which is why I try to be opposite both of them, instead.